Deporting 11
Million Undocumented Immigrants Would be Tantamount to a Crime Against Humanity
There
are many people in the US with ill-conceived notions to deport 11 million
undocumented immigrants from American soil. Assuming for discussion that they
are all Mexicans and can be deported to Mexico, there would arise a string of
refugee camps in every border town in Mexico that would become home to those 11
million people. This number is larger than any refugee event in recorded
history. As a burgeoning "humanitarian crises" develops on our
border, would we provide food, water, doctors and medicine, tents and blankets,
latrines and other infrastructure to alleviate that crises? If we did not,
would not WE be guilty of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and other crimes against
humanity?
At
least while these undocumented people are resident inside our border, they are
geographically dispersed, able to work at some job to support themselves, and
not be forcibly concentrated into camps in a hostile climate. Right now they do
jobs that we want done. They work for far less money than an equivalent
documented citizen would. The only beneficiary of that are businesses that want
cheap labor.
In
the concentration camps there would be nothing for the adults and teenagers to
do. Without the ability to earn money from the outside they would have to rely
on what each new arrival brings. These camps would be ripe pickings for drug
suppliers, child predators and traffickers who promise a nocturnal border
crossing back to the states, for a price.
Saying
you'd deport the illegals is a high and mighty rhetoric, but is only half of
the statement. The other half is that you would create the greatest humanitarian
crises that this hemisphere, and possibly the world, has ever witnessed.
We
as a species of animal that shares this planet with all the others and all the
peoples of the world must come to terms with the potential for massive
migrations that will disrupt every aspect of civilization we have to date
created.
The Dynamics
of Massive Migration
In
the middle of the 20th century a demographer asserted that if you lined up the
Chinese people, five abreast and marched them into the ocean, the line would
never end. Before anyone becomes indignant about repeating that statement here,
this author denies any malice against the Chinese people and mentions this
scenario only to make the point that very large populations have a huge impact
on the earth. Today that number exceeds 25 abreast and the column never ends.
This mathematical example applies to the people of India too.
Now
the purpose of bringing up this bizarre concept is: what if you exchange the
ocean for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran in a mass migration intent on survival
in new land rather than death by drowning? There would be two columns of migrating
people, one Chinese and the other Indian. Two columns collectively 50 people
wide pouring over the borders and into what certainly would be hostile
territory would be an unstoppable tide. To obtain the maximum affect they could
walk in a far wider path and not intend to make the line never-ending.
People
walking at about 4 ft/sec moves 50 ppl/sec over any border line. In a day,
4,320,000 people would cross that border and in just over 115 days, they would
have emigrated 500 million people. There would still be 1.6 billion relatives
back home who could follow if sufficiently motivated.
Of
course these three initial countries are only the beginning. Iraq, Syria and Turkey are next on the
itinerary to Europe. Bulgaria is only a small land bridge away with Greece nor
much further along. East European countries lay beyond with land that would be
squatted and homesteaded by these migrants as they overwhelm the locals. These
are agrarian people, people who make their own furniture, tools and clothes. These
are people who can weave a house out of sticks and hides. They are not
dependent on the electric grid or natural gas pipes. They need no gasoline for
the cars they do not have. They will be amply able to make due with whatever
surface resources are available.
This
is not to say that they would nor denude the forests for firewood and pollute
rivers with their human wastes, but they will be able to survive in the far
more moderate Euro-zone.
Now
all of this conjectured migratory activity supposes that there is a need to do
so. People do not pack up and leave their ancestral homes unless forced by some
vector to do it. Drought and famine come to mind.
I'd
like to point out that a walk along the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea
through Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco is not much of a greater
distance into Europe than going the counter-clockwise route. Spain and Italy
are only a ferry ride away.
Russian
was so concerned about China flooding across their mutual border that they
build their railroads at a different wheel gage so Chinese trains could not use
their track to invade. Even today the Trans Siberian Express stops at the
border each week to change the wheel trucks under all the cars. That process
takes 4 hours. A slow invasion it would be.
Why People Would
Undertake Massive Migration
Here
again China and India stand as proxies for the growing crises of human
migration from Asia and Northern Africa into Europe. In the case of Africa, the
migration can also be characterized as a refugee event where hundreds of
thousands of people are fleeing war, genocide, the extremist Muslim armies that
execute large quantities of people on their march to their State goals.
Fleeing
war and ideological mayhem is only part of the driving forces that motivate
people to walk a thousand miles, float across 250 miles of open sea in crowded
boats only to walk another thousand miles to try to get a job in France or
England.
Northern
Africa is enduring progressive desertification and drought even as they are
experiencing the hottest temperatures since records were first made. War and
religious genocide has made food into a weapon. Burn the fields and kill the
animal herds and the people will die or move away. When the move away there
only is Europe to see as sanctuary. Going south is only walking into deeper
trouble.
Right
now, in August 2015, there are only thousands of Middle Eastern refugees trying
to cross into England from France via the channel tunnel on the last leg of
their search for a better life. They try
to hop trains to get a ride through. This activity although risky, is nowhere near
as dangerous as the trek they make from their homes in countries such as Syria,
Lebanon, Somalia, and others.
As
change occurs to the global climate there will be those people who see more
rain (resulting in flooding and landslides) less rain (resulting in drought,
famine, wildfires and long term desertification) sea levels rise even as the
withdrawal of ground water makes the land sink and allows seawater intrusion.
There will be people whose million dollar homes are lapped at by the high tides
while others will see their entire terrestrial existence covered by the sea.
Even as wildlife activists try to stop arctic oil drilling to save polar bears
and seals, we need to understand that those species are the "canaries in
the mine shaft" and whose fate foreshadows our own.
But
back to migration of humans. We are capable of looking out to sea and seeing
the water rising. We can connect the dots that show us that our accustomed home
is no longer habitable. We can decide to move elsewhere while the polar bears
and migratory birds will die before they can realize what is happening. It is
supposed that humans are the only species that can anticipate dire consequences
of their environment. It could be that others see the carnage to come, but lack
the facilities to stop it (us.)
The
levels of economic migration that we see today may pale in comparison to that
which may arise as millions of sea-level populations are displaced. When the
rivers cease to flow because their headwater sources are depleted there will be
migration. When the soldiers come and decimate civilian settlements, the rest
will flee to places where war is not proximal but they may be as unwelcome in
that sanctuary. Then the noon hour temperature exceeds 100 °F for weeks
on end, populations will get up and move. Many will die on the way, but there
will be no going back nor any way to stay behind.
Whether
it is social strife, religious sectarian violence, drought, flooding, famine,
heat, disease or for economic opportunities there will be huge shifts in human
populations in the coming decades. We have only seen the beginning of the
trend, the part that is driven by sectarian violence and people taking refuge
from war.
While
the Middle Eastern refugees are from sectarian war, the refuges from Central
America are fleeing the violence perpetrated by drug gang rivalries. Think
about what it takes to motivate parents to send their children on a journey of
1000s of miles north to the American border unaccompanied in the belief that
making that journey was far better than staying at home and coping with the
violent culture there.
Internally
in America families trekked west during the Dust Bowl conditions of the 1930s.
Workers in large numbers left the South for northern industrial jobs. People
always follow the work opportunities when they can. Today, people in Mexico and
further south see the land of opportunity and arrive here to get a piece of it.
They arrive with a work ethic that makes them willing to labor in the sun for
starvation wages and sun up to sundown hours. They are willing to stand in
building supply parking lots with the expectation that they will get the
opportunity to hop on the back of a pickup truck or into a van to go to a day
job and earn a few dollars for their efforts.
While
some of the people who seek a better life in a new country are educated and can
land a salaried job, they are not the ones who must cross deserts of foot and
seas in open boats. Those people are the ones who have only the skills that are
commensurate with the offering of minimum wage or less. Americans must not
forget that this country is not the only one that is receiving large numbers of
agrarian laborers who want to eat, sleep and be comfortable in their family
units.
Now
for the other side of migration. If there are 10 lifeboats floating at the
scene of a sinking ship that each hold 25 people and there are 1,000 people in
the water, there is a high probability that every boat will be capsized the 750
people trying to get in too. If someone doesn't arrive soon with an alternative
all are likely to perish. Even when the people already in the boats risk their
survival by taking on just a few more people from the water, they will not be
rewarded for their generosity. There are just too many exhausted people
treading water in the sea for there to be any decorum.
It
is the same on land with overland migration and crowding at the borders.
Countries that border war torn nations have either to accept or turn away the
people who seek refuge. Even when those countries accept the refugees
eventually the conditions will deteriorate into anarchy and chaos will prevail.
Masses of refugees are not particularly adept at self-organizing into sustainable
towns with a chart of rules for where to erect a shelter, where to defecate and
urinate, how to make use of limited resources (especially when there are none
to manage.)
Then
there is the long-term scenario to address. The masses of displaced people
cannot live in the makeshift camps forever. They must survive the winters, the
summers, the lack of food and water, the communicable diseases that always
erupts in such places. The hopes of the host countries is that they will eventually
go home. While many would love to go home, for many there is no home to go back
to.
Host Countries
Must Come to Grips With Migration
As
long as there is a place from which people need to flee and there is a better
place to go, there will be migration. Trying to hold them back is like the
story of the Dutch Boy with his finger in the dike. Eventually he will run out
of fingers and arm length to save the town. The migrants come for many varied
reasons and they are indeed a tide. As long as there is a shore on which to
break, there will be a swell and a breaking wave that washes over the coast
line. Each host country needs to devise a plan for how to accommodate that
tide.
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